Revisionist History

Iraq’s Al-Rafidein television, a Sunni station, gives its viewers a lesson in American history, the gist of which is that American Presidents have been slaughterers of the innocent pretty much from the beginning:

In some cases, the history lesson is ludicrously off the mark; Richard Nixon, for example, did not send 540,000 soldiers to invade Vietnam. It’s interesting, too, that not even the wimpiest Presidents can escape the wrath of the Islamists. Poor Franklin Pierce, who was a lousy President but anything but a warmonger, is indicted for “[t]hreatening the Japanese empire with the American fleet,” while Jimmy Carter was the “[s]ponsor of the Camp David Accords with the Zionist entity.” Even Bill Clinton gets more credit than he deserves for a “[a]n intensive missile attack on Iraq in 1998.”

On the whole, though, al-Rafidein’s depiction of American history isn’t too far removed from what one hears from leftist academics, or for that matter leftist preachers like Jeremiah Wright.

PAUL adds: I may be wrong, but I always thought it was Millard Fillmore who ordered the fleet to Japan, although the treaty that Commodore Perry’s visit produced was signed early in the Pierce presidency.